Hacker unswindles Amazon's Kindle?

Aharon Etengoff, 24th December 2009

A number of hackers have managed to disarm the DRM restrictions imposed on Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.

Indeed, a hacker known as "I love cabbages" recently released a program called "Unswindle" that converts Amazon's indigenous .azw into various decrypted file formats.

"Amazon actually put a bit effort behind the DRM obfuscation in their Kindle for PC application (K4PC). The Kindle proper and Kindle for iPhone/iPod app both use a single 'device' encryption key for all DRMed content," Cabbages explained in an official blog post.

"K4PC uses the same encryption algorithms, but ups the ante with a per-book session key for the actual en/decryption. And they seem to have done a reasonable job on the obfuscation. Way to go Amazon! It's good enough that I got bored unwinding it all and just got lazy with the Windows debugging APIs instead."

Meanwhile, an Israeli hacker named Labba has also come up with a method of bypassing the Kindle's restrictions by decompiling and cracking the DRM algorithm.